Why would you? If you are handed the keys to an economy already weak in the knees, why would you give it a big punch in the gut? That's exactly what Barack Obama has done, particularly with an anti-job, anti-growth, anti-American energy policy. Look at the evidence.
Economies expand on energy. And, no economy in the history of the world has ever proved that better than the U.S. But, with the economy already on the ropes, Obama put in place an Administration and an agenda – "the most anti-oil-and-gas record in U.S. history" says Steve Forbes - that can only be seen for what it is, a war on traditional sources of energy and the great American free-market economy.
Let's put in it in context. Gas prices were $1.84 per gallon when Obama took over in January, 2009. Today, they are $3.52 and rapidly rising. That's a 91% increase in just over two years.
AAA estimates that Americans drive an average of 12,000 miles per year and use 533 gallons of gas in the process. That means the cost for just fuel has jumped $895 per year since Obama took charge. For a two or three driver family, you can do the math. It's like every time you fill up the tank a thief grabs an extra $35 out of your pocket.
The huge ripple effect of higher energy costs is just beginning to be felt. Higher costs of production and transportation will be passed on to every consumer product, particularly at the grocery store. And, this comes at a time when one-in-four Americans are already worried about having enough money to put food on the family table.
Yes, the chaos in the Middle-East is partly to blame for the recent spike in prices. Uncertainty in supply of any commodity will invariably bump up prices. However, the rise in energy prices started long before any unrest in the oil producing countries, and clearly there is a conscious, strategic, intentional effort by this Administration to drive prices even higher. Rather than a strategy to keep supplies plentiful and relatively affordable, this Administration is aggressively limiting production, imposing more restrictive regulation, and seeking penalizing taxes on consumers. Policies driven by an obsession to control our driving behavior, force us out of our cars, destroy the traditional energy industry and replace it with a new Green god. All of that will, of course, mean higher prices, less jobs, and a further drag on an already struggling economy.
To accomplish his mission and execute his plan, Obama loaded up his Administration with key individuals, The Four Horsemen of the Energy Apocalypse – Steven Chu, Lisa Jackson, Carol Browner, and Ken Salazar. Unfortunately, their plan is working.
Here's the evidence.
Obama's Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu has been on a 15 year mission to raise gas taxes. He told the Wall Street Journal in late 2008, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."
If Europe is the Administration's idea of energy nirvana, hang on to your wallet. Gas prices across much of Europe are currently over $8.00 a gallon. Haven't we already gotten too much of just-like-Europe from Mr. Hope-and-Change?
Not surprisingly, Obama's latest budget proposal embraces a transportation plan that industry experts project will require a new gasoline tax of 25-40 cents per gallon.
His appointment to head the EPA, Lisa Jackson, was a well established liberal activist, environmental true believer with veteran EPA bureaucratic credentials along with a highly controversial environmental stint in John Corzine's administration in New Jersey. Once in office, Jackson immediately declared carbon dioxide to be an environmental pollutant, and with that designation she had authority to regulate it under the Clean Air Act. Rather convenient – kind of like squatters rights for the bureaucracy – she claimed it and gets to regulate it.
In announcing her plans to aggressively regulate her favorite new pollutant Jackson said, "Fortunately, it follows President Obama's call for a low-carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation." Another remarkable coincidence.
At the time of the announcement, The New York Times reported that, "Many Republicans in Congress and industry spokesmen warned that regulation of carbon dioxide emissions would raise energy costs and kill jobs (emphasis added); Democrats and environmental advocates said the decision was long overdue and would bring long-term social and economic benefits." Who guessed right on that one?
Of whatever "science" that Jackson based her claim on, she apparently chose to ignore some from a pretty good source, Mother Nature. An extensive summary report by the National Center for Policy Analysis explains that the vast majority of the atmosphere is nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), and that less than 2% of the entire atmosphere is made up of green house gases. Of that two percent, carbon dioxide comprises only a tiny fraction, 3.62%, while water vapor (the stuff of which rain is made) encompasses 95 percent. And of the small amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, humans cause only 3.4 percent of annual CO2 emissions. Animals, including man, exhale CO2 and plants absorb it. Atmospheric levels of CO2 have changed throughout history. It was nine times greater during the Jurassic Period when all the dinosaurs were around, and 18 times greater during the ancient Cambrian age when there was "an explosion of life forms" on the planet. While we should not ignore the possible build up of greenhouse gases, man's portion is pretty limited. According to the NCPA, "Humanity is responsible for about one-quarter of one percent of the greenhouse effect."
If Jackson wasn't already enough, Obama appointed Carol Browner to be his Energy Czar as the "coordinator of climate and energy policies" for the White House. Prior to her appointment, Browner was the Vice-President of Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection. She was also in a leadership position for the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the "action arm for climate change" of Socialists International, a "global governance" umbrella organization of leftist political parties that "supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies." An Obama spokesman said Browner's affiliation with the group created no problems and that she brought the kind of experience to the administration that would benefit the new President's "efforts to create jobs, (and) achieve energy security." Browner left the Administration in January, 2011. According to CNN, 7.9 million jobs have been lost. Gas prices have nearly doubled.
Obama campaigned on a pledge to attack climate change by implementing cap-and-trade legislation, but failed to get congressional support despite large Democrat majorities. That didn't stop him, though. Working in tandem, Jackson and Browner bypassed the need for legislation and used regulatory fiat. The EPA "turned a regulatory firehose on U.S. business and the power industry in particular," wrote the Wall Street Journal, having proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules" in just two years. This bureaucratic assault against our free-market economy is "unprecedented" in U.S. history, and it came in the middle of a deep economic recession.
Shortly after taking office, Obama through the EPA, implemented new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards requiring car manufacturers to achieve a 35.5 mpg fleet average by 2016. Last fall, news leaked out that the EPA intends to almost double CAFE to 62 mpg by 2025. Obama and his Central Planners believe this will force adoption of alternative energy.
Obama believes he can force America to abandon traditional energy and go-green regardless of cost or technology readiness. In the recent State-of-the-Union he said he wants "to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015." It's not going well, so far.
The plug-in electric Chevy Volt (manufactured by GM, aka: "Government Motors"), debuted last fall amid great fanfare. It's a compact four seater that lists for $41,000. Only 928 have been sold thus far; just 321 in January and 281 in February. But, that's better than the Nissan Leaf that has only moved 173 in two months. Their CEO predicted sales of 500,000 per year by 2013. They'd better hurry.
The Volt was already on the drawing board when General Motors went bankrupt and was rescued by Obama with $50 billion of taxpayer funds. Obama's taskforce determined the Volt "will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short term," but that mattered not at all. The Administration seized the moment to force an electric hybrid to the market.
Ed Niedermeyer, editor of The Truth About Cars, wrote in the New York Times that in addition to the billions in bailout funds to "retool" GM plants, the government subsidized development of the Volt with $240 million in grants, another $150 million went to the Volt's Korean battery supplier, and up to $1.5 billion in buy-down incentives (subsidies) for consumers. After all that, the government's return-on-investment is "a vehicle that costs $41,000 but offers the performance and interior space of a $15,000 economy car," says Niedermeyer. He calls the Volt "an act of political self-denial."
Along with Chu, Jackson, and Browner, the Fourth Horseman of Obama's Energy Apocalypse is the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. Salazar should know better, hailing from an energy rich Western state, Colorado, but along the way he drank the environmentalist kool-aid and took the Obama green-at-any-cost pledge.
This is the same Ken Salazar who while still in the Senate in 2008 went on record stating he had no problem if Americans had to pay $5.00, or $7.50, or even $10.00 a gallon for gasoline. It was probably at that moment that Obama knew he'd be a perfect fit as his anti-energy Secretary of the Interior.
Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Doc Hastings (R-WA) has compiled a list of more than 40 grievances – "American Energy Roadblocks by the Obama Administration" – that Hastings says have cost America jobs and increased energy prices. Most of the complaints involve direct actions taken by Salazar.
Upon taking office, Salazar cancelled 77 official leases on federal lands in Utah. Shortly thereafter, he cancelled leases on the massive oil shale reserves in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Within days of the Deep Horizon well explosion he unilaterally imposed a permitting moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, falsely claiming to have support of the scientific community. A Federal Court order forced him to lift the moratorium, only to have him reinstate another within days. The same Court has recently found Salazar and the Administration in "contempt" of his order to lift the ban on offshore permits. Unilaterally, Salazar imposed a ban on U.S. reserves in the Eastern Gulf, the Atlantic, Pacific, and he steadfastly refuses to open development in the Arctic. He invented a new "wild lands" designation further restricting development on tens of millions of acres of western energy rich federal lands.
In his press conference last week, Obama defended his energy policy saying under his Administration we were "on a path to finally secure America's energy future." But, Jack Gerard, President of the American Petroleum Institute, didn't rely on rhetoric, he cited the facts. On Salazar's watch, revenues from onshore federal oil and gas leasing in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming have plunged more than 80%, Gerard says. Worse, the total acreage leased has shrunk to its lowest level ever. Ever….that's a long time, especially when our demand for energy continues to increase right along with that of the rest of the world.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the Senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has concluded that "Higher gas prices – indeed, higher prices for the energy we use – are an explicit policy goal of the Obama Administration." Inhofe notes that 83% of federal land has been made off-limits to energy development. Inhofe also bursts a myth that the U.S. has limited energy reserves. A November 30, 2010 report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service that documents the U.S. has greater combined reserves of oil, natural gas and coal than any other nation in the world. In fact more than Saudi Arabia, China, and Canada combined (the number 3, 4, and 6 nations). See graph below.
Source: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_i...
The CRS report, Inhofe says, proves that we have oil reserves "to maintain our current levels of production and replace our imports from the Persian Gulf for more than 50 years." Natural Gas reserves will see us through 90 years, and coal enough for more than two centuries. And, the CRS report does not even include the perhaps trillion barrels of recoverable oil from the western Green River shale reserves, nor the vast energy potential contained in methane hydrates awaiting research technology advancement to harvest the resources.
Regardless of the fact that the U.S. has the greatest total fossil fuel reserves in the world, Obama and his Four Horsemen don't want America to use it. It would be like having bins stuffed with U.S. wheat and corn, but the government forces us to eat rice imported from China. Obama is going to force us to go green even if it breaks the back of the American economy and compromises our national security. By the way, 96% of the rare earth elements necessary to manufacture things like solar cells, magnets for wind turbines, and batteries are controlled by a single nation – The Peoples Republic of China. And, China is increasingly capturing the manufacturing side of the green energy industry, as well. Talk about a concentration of energy dependency!
Steve Forbes believes this Administration is making the same mistakes that Jimmy Carter did leading up to the energy crisis of the 1970s. "They are leading us straight into another national energy disaster," he says. Singling out Salazar, Forbes said "this administration's Department of Interior, with the most anti-oil-and-gas record in U.S. history, is sabotaging any real chance of avoiding the pending energy crisis because of its continued hold on deepwater drilling permits in the Gulf." Forbes fears that the mistaken energy policies pursued by this Administration "could bring this nation to its knees."
Forbes points out that one-third of "the oil used in the U.S. is from the Gulf of Mexico" and yet Salazar's Interior Department is "freezing U.S. energy assets in the Gulf and keeping 97 percent of our offshore oil and gas off limits."
Last Friday, March 11, 2011, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made a joint appearance in a closed door forum at the IHS CERA's Executive Conference to discuss energy policy. According to multiple sources former President Clinton blasted the Obama Administration saying that there are "ridiculous delays in permitting when our economy doesn't need it."
Badgered in his press conference on the very same day about the rising price of gas, Obama claimed that "Last year….oil production from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico reached an all-time high." Not quite.
The problem starts again with Salazar and testimony he made last week to Congress that production in the Gulf of Mexico "remained at an all-time high, and we expect that it will continue as we bring new production online." That's not true.
Figures from the government's own Energy Department (see chart below) confirm a decline in production of 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) since last April and projections for decline of another 300,000 bpd over the next year. Only in Salazar and Obama's mind does a 35% decrease in production over just two years translate to "all-time high production."
Source: http://naturalresources.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=227165
Salazar also told Congress, "In 2009 there were 116 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010 in February, 120, in February 2011, 126." But, rigs don't immediately translate to production, especially if they are sitting idle.
The watchdog fact-checkers at Energy Tomorrow, an API blog, exposed Salazar's fallacy:
"Salazar's numbers distort the true number of working rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. According to Baker Hughes:
• Four days before the Deepwater Horizon accident there were 55 rotary rigs actually drilling offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
•
On May 28, 2010, when the administration announced the six-month
moratorium on deepwater drilling, there were 46 rotary rigs operating in
the Gulf.
• Last week, 25 rotary rigs were operating in the Gulf of Mexico.
So the fact that there is an "all-time high" number of rigs in the Gulf ignores the fact that most of those rigs are not working. Claiming an increase in idle rigs in the Gulf as a success story is like claiming the job market is great because a lot of people are unemployed and available to work."
All of which reminds us that there are lies, damn lies, and government politicians and bureaucrats. The 2012 elections cannot come any too soon.
